CygnusX1

I don’t really get the logic here. If someone is staying in Thailand most of the year and funding his life with a pension paid by his country of citizenship, then surely Thailand’s already benefiting from the direct transfer of wealth from that country into Thailand. Really no different from shorter term tourists. If your logic was correct, then a tourist industry would be a net drain of wealth from the host country, yet most countries greatly encourage tourism as they see it as an economic gain.

If I had known that I’d have bought an apartment in Monaco instead of a condo in Thailand.

Yes, certainly very different from Australia! No argument for us farang to get senior concession in Thailand though.

I’ve never understood the logic of discounts for old people. I pay crazily low rates for public transport in Australia, but like most people, have way more money than when I was young - and most Australians of my age have way more money than I do. Maybe in Thailand the elderly really are financially worse off than younger people, but in Australia there’s a lot of understandable resentment against all of the benefits given to wealthy baby boomers.

No wonder I needed the assistance of Google and Wikipedia to figure that one out. I’d never heard of J. Arthur Rank, and I doubt too many other people have!

I just completed this quiz. My Score 40/100 My Time 57 seconds  

Bit late for you now, but if you book online you can reserve a couple of weeks or more in advance from memory. Small surcharge. Just search for “Jomtien to airport bus”.

Anyone know what happened to VT5A and VT5B?

Compared with the colossal amount of work required in order to learn to speak Thai with just a basic level of competence that’s nowhere near fluency, learning less than a hundred symbols and a few tone rules is trivial.

Bora Bora’s not all 5 star plus luxury resorts, most of those are on the fringing islands. Parts of main island have a bit of a 3rd world feel. Certainly the most beautiful airport in the world though, and the only one I’ve experienced in the last 40 odd years with no security checks.

You’ve done an amazing job, highly professional, thanks! Will inspire me to brush up a bit on my extremely limited Thai. All seems to work fine on my iPad, including sounds and the FreeThai game.

Even in Australia, with all of its draconian road rules, nothing seems to be done about motorbikes with noise levels far, far above any reasonable limit, so I wouldn’t hold out too much hope for Thailand.

Sounds like you have heaps more natural talent for learning languages than I have. Only way I can learn a language is by intensive study of text - combined with recordings of course, but I’m memorising the vocab and grammar from the text, not the sound.

I might not be understanding you correctly, but I think most people would say that learning Thai through transliteration is not a good idea. There are so many different transliteration schemes, and the official Thai Govt one is frequently crazy. Take their transliteration “Suvanaphumi”, (สุวรรณภูมิ) as in Bangkok’s international airport, pronounced something like suwanapoom. Why use a ‘v’ instead of a ‘w’? Why use ‘i’ to indicate a vowel that’s silent in the Thai anyway? They use ‘ph’ instead of ‘p’ to show that it’s an aspirated consonant, but English speakers will naturally pronounce it as ‘f’, as in the notorious ‘Phuket’. I suppose the best scheme would be to use the international phonetic alphabet, but you might as well learn the Thai characters if you don’t know that already.

The ห character here is not pronounced, but is used as a sort of marker that changes the class of the ล character, so it’s pronounced something like “‘lung”, but with a rising tone instead of a flat tone. The website thai-language.com explains it all under the “‘reference” section. It all sounds very daunting, but I’ve found it way easier to learn to read Thai than to learn to speak it, which I can do only at the most basic level. When I had my air con installed, I spoke with the technician in English, as his English was much better than my Thai. However, I impressed the hell out of him when he gave me the manual, apologising it was only in Thai, and I began to read it out to him.

My brother-in-law was a former barrister. His reply to questions about any crime, rape or otherwise, was always the same - “I can’t comment, as I’ve not seen all the evidence”.

Whoever the Republicans nominated would have won in a landslide, as he or she would have collected the votes of the many Republicans who dislike or even despise Trump. No, no civil war. I still don’t think Trump’s guaranteed to win, although the odds have shifted in his favour. I have a bet with my far left sister, that if Trump wins, he won’t be leader 5 years from now, either as President for an unconstitutional 3rd term or as Supreme Leader under some other title. I’ve given her odds of 100-1. If she wins, I owe her $1,000, if I win, I get $10. I’m serenely confident that I’ll be $10 richer 5 years from now.

JIB wouldn’t accept my Australian credit card online. No problem using the same card at their physical store.

Yes, good comment. Also related to the idea of whether the human brain has a special ‘language organ’, or if language is just a consequence of the human brain’s power, or if it’s a combination of both.

Yes, I realise that, hence my point about the need for something as fundamentally different as the alleged lack of recursion in an Amazonian language to refute Chomsky’s idea of universal grammar, rather than relatively minor differences such as French’s notorious tenses and irregular verbs compared with Thai’s simpler verbs.

Struggling to learn Thai has made me more sceptical of Chomsky’s claim that all human languages, however different, share the same underlying grammatical structure. There’s a very entertaining book, “Don’t Sleep, there are Snakes” by Daniel Everett, about his life with a tribe of Amazonian Indians, in which he claims their language lacks recursion, which he thinks is a counter example to Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar. I find it curious that certain sections of the far right seem to be gravitating towards Chomsky’s bat **** crazy extreme leftist view of the United States as being the source of most of the world’s evil.

As I’ve said here before, I’ve always found the Russians who have been dominating Jomtien Beach during high season to be perfectly decent people, despite their utterly evil president. Mind you, as the only Russian language I know is “I’m sorry, I don’t speak Russian”, they could well be praising Putin to the skies, but I think they’re only at the beach as Thai sunshine is better than winter in Siberia. Very few Russians when I was last there a couple of weeks ago in low season, because there were very few people of any nationality. I think the controversy over the number of Russian tourists will soon be moot anyway, as the massive expenditure on Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is going to destroy the incipient Russian middle class, who were just beginning to be able to afford regular overseas travel.

Hope payment by QR codes will always remain optional, because I’ve never scanned a QR code and would have no idea how to. It’s just plastic or cash for me.

My point is that 50% above the normal fare was still crazily cheap by the standards of most other countries. I also always give baht bus drivers in Pattaya 20 baht instead of 10. They work so hard and earn so little. Thailand is a great bargain, travelling in Europe right now, and paying a couple of hundred dollars a night for hotels that would be more like 40 a night in central Bangkok.

I’ve never used Uber, beyond my technical ability, but Uber would have been less than $A25 for same distance in Australia?? For that distance, and with that amount of traffic, from my experience I’d estimate that an ordinary taxi in Australia would have been around $100. I’ve paid $60 in Australia for a taxi for a distance I could have easily walked without luggage, and I’d never consider walking to Suv airport from Phrom Pong! I’m in Europe now, and am doing my very best to avoid taxis unless absolutely necessary, whereas in Thailand they’re a practical and cheap form of transport.